Byström, Andreas

Abstract [en]

Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a standard developed by Sun Microsystems for managing resources in a Java environment. Ericsson Utvecklings AB in Älvsjö is currently looking into different techniques to solve Operations & Maintenance (O&M) for their network platforms. They are hoping that JMX could make the interface to their management application more homogeneous and that the costs for development would decrease. The purpose with this thesis is to clarify how JMX would work in a telecom environment and which advantages and disadvantages that could arise. The thesis has been limited to test the compatibility between resources and the JMX solution. How JMX could be connected to a management application is left for later investigation. Telecom components are special because of the requirements concerning high availability, portability and performance. This thesis makes a thorough investigation of the JMX standard and what possibilities and limitations there are. Thereafter a test between two different implementations is made followed with a discussion of the results. This to get an understanding of where the limit is for handling large amount of information from the resources in a JMX solution. The two different solutions are tested in a simulation with a realistic amount of load. The evaluation shows that JMX as a technique is highly suited for management, not only for Java objects but also for all types of resources. The JMX specification is still missing support for usage of remote objects that are not executed in the same JVM. Telecom platforms and their resources are nowadays always built as distributed systems, which mean that the solution for management has to handle this. JMX has therefore been extended so that it is possible to connect remote resources - a modification that resulted in new possibilities to affect the performance. A distinguished characteristic for a resource on a telecom platform is that it generates many notifications that the manager has to handle. Using the fact that the resources are scattered on different machines and that the notifications have different priorities, the O&M systems performance could increase considerably. Tests show that if only alarm events are filtered out (stopping the statistical events) and sent over the remote interface, the system should be able to handle at least 15 times as many notifications. JMX directly applied could just handle today’s requirements, but the other solution gives greater scalability and increases the possibility of reuse in the future.